Group Therapy Poem by Michael Earl Craig

He was a Cossack; he had a crew cut
She was impious; a bacterium dined on her knuckle.
It was Nebraska everywhere.
The luncheonette despised its inhabitants.

He told the group he had not had a feeling in years.
(He'd always called her the group.)
It was a petty quibble in solid milk chocolate.
It was a pair of recently unwrapped chopsticks
on its purplish way into service.

There was a stiffening, she noticed it.
An elongation.
A cementation.
A thrumming, newsy and tepid.
The group held its poise.

An afterglow hung like a cobweb in the doorway.
I used my hand to slowly dismantle it.
I moved my hand in a single, slow movement.
Like a pope dismantling an afterglow.
And the group looked like it might speak.
In each of their minds she repeatedly tripped
on the carpeted corner of a catafalque.
"I am only one, Duane," she said.
"I am only one," she said, again, the slightest bit
of condensation on her upper lip.